Jindřiška Nová

* 1946

  • "Before I went to school, I could read and count, then I, I could do laundry, I could study, so I fought with the boys, so I was good, like at school. Only when I was coming out of that school, my dad just came for that Christmas, I applied in January, I wanted to go because I knew I wouldn't be accepted to the grammar school, I don't know, so I applied to Doubravka in Pilsen, it was like a lower grammar school, but I had absolutely no chance, because I wasn't allowed to go with straight A's, and with C's they got in. I took that as such an injustice." - "And why weren't you allowed?" - "Because they wrote to my dad that the national committee in Tremosna and the eight-year-old high school like me were not recommended for school. For one thing, dad had been punished and imprisoned against the state, and for another, parents don't participate in public life. Well, that just about sealed it for me. And I wanted, I always thought I was going to be a pediatrician, and then I thought, 'Well, if I'm going to treat these Bolshevik kids, it's better I didn't.'"

  • "My grandfather was already in a very bad way, like his father, so Dad asked if he could visit him before he died, and strangely enough they allowed it. And I remember the other cousin, like from Aunt Slava, she wasn't born until July and dad was locked up on the 7th. So she came running to us, like from the farm, and she came, because we were going to visit the next day, so she came running to us and she said: 'Aunt, either Uncle Mira is with us, he was dad's brother, there were two of them, he was a teacher, or he is your dad.' So mom ran over there, well, dad was sitting there in Grandma's room wearing Grandpa's clothes. I remember that, like a tweed jacket and trousers, and when they let him out, he was allowed to wear his bluecoats and come over to Grandma's, like at my parents' in Pilsen. They were always like Pilseners from the city. And now his mother reproached him why he went to his grandmother's, to his parents' house first, and not to her house, and he told her that he didn't know how she would welcome him. You know, it was terrible."

  • "And we came there and they always, when we were there, they would bring them in the bus, the convicts, they were all sitting in the bus, and I was still thinking, we're always so overcrowded when we go there, and they..., well they had to sit so the guards could keep an eye on them. And then when we got there, it was such a horrible wooden hut, and we went in through one entrance from the front and the other from the back, and the convicts always came in. And then when we had a visitor, they were, but I don't know if it was also in that Milín, because I was five or six years old. But otherwise it was like that in Vojna and Bytíz. These were tables maybe a foot or so wide and in the middle was a board about 25 numbers high and over that were white cloths, like tablecloths. We didn't know if they had listening devices or what. Well, and dad, when he was sitting there, on each side of him it was guard, convict, convict, guard, they still walked around that room, it was pretty big, so the floor rumbled when it was wooden, and they still stood there afterwards. And one time my dad whispered to my mother, 'Bóža Modrý is here.' So dad survived."

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    Praha, 11.12.2018

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They threatened to lock my mom up too and put us in a orphanage

Jindřiška Nová, 2018
Jindřiška Nová, 2018
zdroj: Post Bellum

Jindřiška Nová was born on 15 January 1946 in Pilsen to her mother Maria, née Šnajdrová, from a family of farmers, and her father Jindřich Kelíšek, who ran a drugstore in Třemošná. In April 1950, his father was arrested and subsequently sentenced in a mock trial for treason to 16 years in prison, of which he served over nine years in the camps in Jáchymov, Bytíz and Vojna near Příbram. He was released in 1959 and not fully rehabilitated until the 1990s, his family having long suffered the fate of relatives of a political prisoner. His younger sister could only train as a saleswoman, while his mother painted carriages for the Czechoslovak State Railways. Jindřiška Nová was not allowed to study at grammar school and became an electromechanic, later graduating from the secondary industrial school. In 1967 she married Josef Nová, who, as the son of a kulak, was denied access to education. He became an electrician and, after refusing to join the Communist Party, lost his job as a foreman in the apprenticeship. They raised one daughter together. Jindřiška Nová worked until 1992 in various positions in the Škodovka factory in Plzeň, for a very low salary, given her cadre materials. There she also experienced the end of the communist regime, although she had great expectations, but the post-Cold War developments eventually disappointed her. After 2000, Jindřiška Nová decided to sue for compensation for the dead and living inventory that the family had put into the unified agricultural cooperative in the 1950s. Her claim was rejected by the courts in several instances and she became trapped in a trap of debts and executions for legal costs.